New Word Coinages

 

[As many readers of Rick On Theater will already know, I’m a language geek.  I first studied Latin in 8th grade (back when there were still Romans here and there) and was so enthused that I actually chose to go to summer school and take first-year high school Latin. 

[I continued with Latin for two more years until I learned that my father was joining the U.S. Foreign Service and my brother and I would be going to Germany to live and would be going to school in Switzerland.  So, in my sophomore year, I took French (as well as Latin) and tried to teach myself German from one of those self-teaching books.

[I didn’t really get very far with one year of American high school French and the teach-yourself method was harder than I thought.  But when I arrived in Germany that summer to stay, and my dad had hired a tutor for German, I took off like a rocket.  This was neat!  Our lessons were all in German, and afterwards, I went out into the little city where we were living and explored or ran errands . . . all in German. 

[Latin had been fun, but people—people all around me—actually spoke this new language.  And little by little, so did I.  By the time I got to school in September, I was put in third-year German, though I had never had a day’s lesson before that summer.

[And now, as the school was in the Suisse Romande, the French-speaking part of Switzerland—I was near Geneva—I began to learn French, too.  Our classes were in English, but the rest of our lives were in French.  (Back home in Koblenz, my family had gotten friendly with a French army family that was also stationed there.  They had a son, Marc, who was my age and a daughter, Marion, who was my brother’s age.  We’d hang out like teens everywhere, and, while they spoke a little English and a little German, we spoke mostly French—more and more as my French improved.

[I got pretty good pretty fast.  I paid attention to what the native-speakers said and picked up the accents—both French and German—and the slang (including the scat) and the conversational expressions and the idioms, and eventually, I could almost pass for native.  (People often thought I was from some other part of the country, but they didn’t peg me for an American until I slipped up, or told them.  (I’ve told this before, in “An American Teen in Germany” and “Going to a Swiss International School.”)

[I didn’t get to the level of trilingual, but I was close.  There was even an incident, when I was with Marc at a Rhine River castle ruin where we had a German-speaking guide and were joined on the walk by an American couple and I found myself translating the guide’s German into French for Marc and into English for the couple, and then the English and French questions into German for the guide!

[This was one of those instances when the Americans thought I was a local, and they complimented me on how well I spoke English.  When I said I was American like them, they didn’t believe me at first.  Then I told them I was born in Washington and that my father was a diplomat in Koblenz, a few clicks along the river.

[One thing that fascinated me in this experience with languages I was having was in seeing how the three tongues—not just the words and phrases, but also the structures, the grammar and the syntax—resembled each other and how they were different.  As readers might know, French, German, and English are all related because they developed as branches of the same language group, the Indo-European family of languages.  (I would later go on to study Russian, which is another branch of the same group. The similarities and differences appeared there as well.)

[But I also got a kick out of learning how some totally trivial things are entirely different—like why the card game we call crazy eights, in French is huit américains (eight Americans).  And why do the French call an ‘April fool’ a poisson d’avril (April fish)?  (A German just shouts, "April, April!")  Here’s one that’s even a little insulting: what we call ‘brass knuckles’ (and the Brits call a ‘knuckle duster’), the Germans call a Schlagring, which is pretty close: ‘punch ring.’  But the French call it a poing américain—an ‘American fist’!

[When I went back to the States for college after three years of living in Europe—I would commute back and forth for two more years—I got two years advanced placement in both French and German, so I skipped all the freshman and sophomore classes and went right into junior- and senior-level courses.  Double-majoring was an obvious decision, and it also left room in my schedule for other classes I could take just for my own edification.  Among others I took, I took Russian and a course in linguistics, the scientific study of language and its structure. 

[Both those decisions, though I made them at the time just for my own pleasure and curiosity, turned out to be fortuitous.  I was an Army ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) cadet and was commissioned a second lieutenant when I graduated.  I took a six-month break and was reporting for active duty in December.  This was 1969, and there was a war going on in Southeast Asia.  I was a military intelligence officer and the life expectancy of MI lieutenants in Vietnam was five minutes after deplaning.

[I reported to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the officer’s basic course.  (MI didn’t have its own officer’s basic course at that time, so it farmed us out to larger programs, including infantry at Fort Benning and armor (that’s tanks—you know, like Patton—the modern cavalry, for you non-military types) at Knox.

[Well, the first days of our training included many tests and examinations, among them a language aptitude test.  Lo and behold! it was exactly the same as the midterm and final exam of my linguistics class at college seven or eight months earlier—not the same questions, of course, but the same kind of problems to solve.  I maxed the test!  Not just the highest score of all the test-takers, but the highest score possible.

[So, when the officer from the Pentagon who was advising us MI officers about career choices had the mass meeting with all of us, the first thing he did was call out my name.  Of course, I figured I’d done something wrong—and so did everyone else in the room.  (I didn’t know about the test score yet.)  Then he announced what I’d done and said that I had the choice of any available language class, but that if I didn’t make a selection, the army’d choose one for me.  That meant only one language course—Vietnamese—which meant only one assignment—a year in Vietnam.

[Now, there was one slot in a Russian class and everyone who wanted language training was waiting to see what I’d do because I was going to get first pick and everyone had to choose from what was left.  Of course, I was going to take the Russian course!  It was a year-long gig doing something that was, for me, like playtime.  That’s all I needed to know to make my decision, but what I didn’t reckon on, because I didn’t know until I got there, was that the Presidio of Monterey is probably the prettiest post in the U.S. Army; Monterey, California, on a bay in the Pacific Ocean, an hour or an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco, is easily one of most gorgeous spots on this continent; and my duty would be six hours of class—three in the morning, two hours for lunch, and three hours in the afternoon—for five days a week, and few military responsibilities.  All I had to do was study Russian.  OMG!  Please, please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch!

[This was my life for 50 weeks, plus two off at Christmas/New Years.  By the end of the course, I knew I was being posted to Germany—exactly where, I didn’t know.  I got myself released from the last hour of the Russian classes to shoot over to the German department to brush up on that language, and at the end of my tour at the Defense Language Institute, I took the proficiency tests in German and French, and, of course, the Russian test came at the end of the course.  So, my record now reflected that, along with whatever other attributes I offered, I was proficient in three foreign languages: French, German, and Russian.

[From California I had to come back east for intelligence training.  They tapped me for counterintel, which was five months of training at Fort Holabird, Maryland, located in the dock area of Baltimore harbor.  The training was fine, even interesting—I was learning to be a counter-spy, how could that not be interesting—but the post sucked.  It was very old and it was closing (the Intel Center was moving out west to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where MI would finally have its own officer’s basic programs), so the army wasn’t expending any time, effort, or funds to keep the place up.  We were the last officer class to train there and then it was being decommissioned.  (The Watergate burglars were incarcerated there in 1974, after the place had been shuttered for three years.  As I’ve said several times, they were well and truly punished being locked up at Holabird.)

[At Holabird, I got my assignment for Germany.  At first, I couldn’t believe it.  Berlin!  Not just Germany, which I already knew, but Berlin.  It was reputed to be the best assignment in Europe (maybe even the whole army), and for MI, because of its sensitivity, only the top personnel available were sent there.  Then, of course, I saw why.  Aside from anything in my personal make-up the army might have spotted, there’s no place on Earth where the U.S. had troops where facility in English, French, German, and Russian was a major asset, especially in Military Intelligence, than West Berlin.

[Unlike the rest of Germany—both of them, really, the West and the East—Berlin, because there’d been no peace treaty signed after World War II, was still under occupation.  The four post-war sectors were still occupied by troops from the wartime allies: the United States, the British, the French, and the Soviets.  We all had unfettered access to all four sectors, and we all took advantage of that provision.  On top of that, Berlin was the spy capital of Europe in those days.  There were probably more intelligence operatives of one kind or another in Berlin when I got there than anywhere except Saigon.

[So, my language acuity, my language study, my interest in languages, and the three I ended up studying, plus that remarkable piece of luck with the test at Fort Knox—not how well I did on it: that wasn’t luck, but that it was that kind of test and that I’d taken that linguistics course just before—all came together to land me in West Berlin for my last 2½ years in the army.  All because I was—am—a language geek.] 

“BAMBOOZLING ELDERS WITH TERMS ALL THEIR OWN”
by Madison Malone Kircher 

[I read the article following this one a few days ago, and decided to repost it.  Then, as I was working on it, I found the piece directly below in the New York Times of 12 November 2023 (in the “Sunday Styles” Section).  I decided to run them both.  (It turns out there are a few more articles on the subject of either Internet slang or the current cant of Generation Alpha, and you’ll find them in some of the embedded links as you go along.  Madison Malone Kircher’s article was also posted to the paper’s website as “Gen Alpha Is Here. Can You Understand Their Slang?” on 8 November.]

Are you a sigma? How much rizz do you have? And, are you going to pay that Fanum tax?

Do you know what a gyat is? What about a rizzler? And how, precisely, does one pay a Fanum tax?

Welcome to the language of Gen Alpha, the cohort [birth years 2013-24] coming up right behind Gen Z [born around 1997 to 2012]. These children of millennials [born from 1981 to 1996; also called Gen Y] have begun a generational rite of passage — employing their own slang terms and memes, and befuddling their elders in the process.

[Most people in the U.S. are familiar with the concept of social generations (as distinguished from familial generations).  I’m a member of the Baby Boom Generation, born between 1946 and 1964 (I was born at the end of 1946, 15 months after the end of World War II).  My parents were both part of the Greatest Generation, born from 1901 to 1927 (Dad in November 1918, six days before the World War I armistice; Mom in April 1923, just five months after Benito Mussolini was named prime minister of Italy and established the first modern totalitarian state in Western Europe, a preliminary step on the path to World War II).

[Generally, the span of birth years for social generations varies around 15 years, but it’s not set and different historians and writers use different dates to define generational membership.  Gen Z is the last demographic cohort—another term for ‘social generation’—to have members born in the 20th century. 

[Gen Alpha gets its name because it follows the scientific protocol of using the Greek alphabet to designate chronological order or hierarchy, and Gen Alpha is the first cohort entirely born in the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.  (Gen Beta is the projected designation for the cohort born in 2025-39.)]

Which brings us back to gyat (rhymes with “yacht,” with a hard “g” and a firm emphasis on “yat”).

“There’s no cute way to say it — it’s just a word for a big butt,” said Alta, a 13-year-old eighth grader in Pennsylvania. “If someone has a big butt, someone will say ‘gyat’ to it.”

Alta and her brother Kai, an 11-year-old sixth grader, said they had learned the word on TikTok and that it had suddenly become popular among their classmates. The internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme credits the sudden popularity of “gyat” to the Twitch livestreamer [sic] Kai Cenat. (In August, Mr. Cenat made headlines when his fans swarmed Union Square Park in Manhattan after he promised to give away gaming consoles at no cost.)

“I don’t say ‘gyat’ to people, though, unless they’re my friend,” Alta said. “And we say it to our mom.”

Several other new words have become part of this generation’s vernacular, and six members of Gen Alpha offered their decoding services for this article. (Their parents gave permission for them to be interviewed, with the agreement that their last names would not be used.) Many of the children cited a catchy parody song [this link seems to be broken, perhaps due to the controversy over TikTok; try gyatt for the rizzler by Buni | Suno] making the rounds on TikTok as a key to the slang’s rising popularity. The lyrics go like this:

Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler
You’re so skibidi
You’re so Fanum tax
I just wanna be your sigma

A rizzler is a “good person,” according to Malcolm, a 10-year-old in Washington state.

“Having rizz is when you have good game,” Alta said. “Being a rizzler is like when you’re a pro at flirting with people.” (Rizz is short for charisma.)

The word can be used as a compliment or a joke, according to Jaedyn, 12. She said that the boys at her school in New Jersey had been singing the song lately, adding that it gave her a headache.

Jaedyn added that “nobody really knows” the meaning of “skibidi.” It has entered the lexicon by way of the animated series “Skibidi Toilet,” which has racked up more than 700 million views on YouTube. A typical episode is about 15 seconds long and features a man who pops his head out of a toilet bowl and launches into a song heavy on the use of the word that gives the show its name. (It’s easier if you just watch it. Boomers might think of “Skibidi Toilet” as a 2020s answer to the animations of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”)

“I don’t like,” Tariq, 8, said of the series. “It creeps me out. Every time I go to the toilet, I just want to get it quick done.” Tariq, who lives in New York State and is known online as Corn Kid, said he was not familiar with the other terms.

Fanum tax refers to Fanum, a popular streamer on Twitch who regularly appears online with Mr. Cenat. When friends are eating in Fanum’s presence, he insists that they share some of their food with him. That’s the Fanum tax.

And sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

In a TikTok video posted in October, Philip Lindsay, a special-education math teacher in Payson, Ariz., listed a few terms he had been hearing in the classroom, including Fanum tax and gyat. “Which does not mean ‘get your act together,’” Mr. Lindsay, 29, said in the video, which has since been viewed over four million times.

His students tried at first to make him believe that gyat was an acronym that stood for “go you athletic team,” he said in an interview. He recently had to explain gyat’s real meaning to a colleague whose students had convinced the teacher to display the word in the classroom.

Mr. Lindsay said the new words struck him as more “meme-like” than earlier slang terms. He added that he believed they were “driven mainly by social media, TikTok specifically.”

Gen Alpha is still being born, according to demographers. Its birth years span from 2010 to 2025, said Mark McCrindle, a generational researcher in Australia who coined the name Gen Alpha several years ago.

Online, members of Gen Z have begun to realize they are no longer the new kids on the digital block — and that Gen Alpha might be coming for them, in the same way that they had once gone after millennials.

Anthony Mai, a TikTok creator with a large following, recently posted a video of himself wearing a comically deadpan expression as the Gen Alpha-slang song played. “Gen Alpha is making their own memes now,” he wrote in a caption. “It has begun. We are the next cringe gen on the chopping block.”

Intergenerational comedy has become a staple on social media platforms, where creators dramatize the differences between age groups. Skibidi and gyat fit snugly into the memes and video shorts belonging to this subgenre.

“Whenever I think about the linguistic differences between generations, I just think, Are we really going to do this again?” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. “Generational differences and divides have always been played up to some extent, even before the heyday of the internet, but social media really exacerbates them.” She cited “OK, boomer,” a retort popularized online by Gen Z in 2019, as an example.

As Gen Alpha’s slang terms make their way into the wider (read: older) world, the young people responsible for their popularity are ready to move onto what’s next.

“If millennials start saying them, we’ll be like, ‘We’re done with these now,’” Jaedyn said.

[Madison Malone Kircher is a reporter for the Times.  She writes about the internet for the Styles desk.]

*  *  *  *
 
“HE’LL TRANSLATE THE LATEST SLANG FOR YOU”
by Callie Holtermann 

[Callie Holtermann’s article on today’s neologisms from the mouths and keyboards of the latest generation to make itself felt on our culture and its verbal expression ran in the New York Times on 27 July 2025, in the “Sunday Styles” Section.  On the Times’ website, it was posted as “The Harvard-Educated Linguist Breaking Down ‘Skibidi’ and ‘Rizz’” on 12 July.]

A Harvard-educated linguist breaks down ‘skibidi,’ ‘rizz’ and other algorithm-fueled words.

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.”

[Adam Aleksic (b. 2001) is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on National Public Radio, repeatedly contributed to the Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk (independent event similar to a TED Talk in presentation that can be organized by anyone who obtains a free license from TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design]) at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City. (from his Penguin Random House bio)]

Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive,” a euphemism for suicide [or ‘dead’] that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language” [Alfred A. Knopf, 2025], these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.

“The more I looked into it, the more I realized that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,” Mr. Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the Manhattan apartment he shares with a roommate and wearing socks stitched with tiny dolphins.

Even those who steer clear of social media are not exempt. If you have encountered Oxford University Press’s 2024 word of the year, “brain rot” (the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” thanks to a fire hose of digital content), you, too, have had a brush with social media’s ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world.

Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat.” (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)

The videos are more rigorous than their informal quality might suggest. Each one takes four or five hours to compose, he said. He scripts every word, and combs Google Scholar for relevant papers from academic journals that he can cite in screenshots.

He appears to be fashioning himself as Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. In the process, he has become a go-to voice for journalists and anyone older than 30 who might want to understand why “Skibidi Toilet,” the nonsensical name of a YouTube series, has wormed its way into Gen Alpha’s vocabulary [see article posted above].

[William Sanford Nye (b. 1955) is a science communicator, television presenter, and former mechanical engineer known universally as “Bill Nye the Science Guy” (for his like-titled TV show [1993-99; Public Broadcasting Service and syndication]).]

What he wants now is to be taken seriously outside of those circles. “I want to balance being a ‘ha-ha funny’ TikToker with academic credibility,” he said. “It’s a little hard to strike that balance when you are talking about ‘Skibidi Toilet’ on the internet.”

‘Rizz’: A Case Study

Mr. Aleksic settled in his living room, under the apparent surveillance of several stick-on googly eyes left over from his most recent birthday party. To the left of the entrance was a makeshift ball pit filled with orbs that resembled enormous plastic Dippin’ Dots. (He installed it as a bit, but has come to appreciate its ability to foster conversation.)

[Maybe I’m alone here, but I never heard of Dippin’ Dots, so I had to look it up. If there are others in my boat, here’s the scoop (pun intended—sorry):

[Dippin' Dots is a brand of ice cream, yogurt, sherbet, and flavored ice that comes in small, bead-shaped pieces about the size of a small pea. They’re created by flash-freezing the ice cream mix in liquid nitrogen at extremely low temperatures which prevents the formation of large ice crystals, resulting in a denser and creamier texture than regular ice cream.]

In person, he is animated but not frenetic, a click or three less intense than he appears in his videos. He is happy to lean into the persona of a fast-talking know-it-all if it means engaging people who wouldn’t otherwise spare a thought for etymology.

He started speeding up his cadence when he realized that brisk videos tended to get more views. “I’ll retake a video if I don’t think I spoke fast enough,” he said.

Just as Mr. Aleksic changed the way he spoke in response to algorithmic pressure, language, too, can be bent by users seeking an audience on social media.

Take “rizz,” which means something along the lines of “charisma.” According to Mr. Aleksic, the word was popularized by the Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Mr. Cenat’s every move. Soon, the word had been flagged by TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as a trending topic that it could highlight to keep viewers engaged. Influencers — including Mr. Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in.

Words have always traveled from insular communities into wider usage: Mr. Aleksic likes the example of “OK,” which was Boston newspaper slang in the 19th century that spread with the help of Martin Van Buren’s re-election campaign. (His nickname in full, “Old Kinderhook,” was a bit of a mouthful.)

[Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) was the 8th President of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general (1815-19) and U.S. senator (1821-28), then briefly as the 9th governor of New York (1829). He was from Kinderhook—hence the nickname—in the eastern part of New York, relatively close to the Massachusetts border.]

But “delulu” [noun: delusion; delusional person; adjective: delusional] and “rizz” didn’t need the eighth president’s help to travel across the country — they had the internet. And TikTok’s powerful algorithm is more efficient at getting the word out than Old Kinderhook’s most overachieving press secretary.

Today, the cycle of word generation has been turbocharged to the point that some of its output hardly makes sense. Nowhere is that more evident than in a chapter titled “Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler,” a chaotic mélange of slang that is hilarious to middle schoolers precisely because it is so illegible to adults. Words and phrases don’t need to be understood to go viral — they just have to be funny enough to retain our attention.

Mr. Aleksic argues that “algospeak” is no longer as simple as swapping sex for “seggs”; it is a linguistic ecosystem in which words rocket from the margins to the mainstream in a matter of days, and sometimes fade just as fast. When influencers modify their vocabulary and speech patterns for maximum visibility, those patterns are reinforced among their audiences.

Does that have to be a bad thing? Moments of linguistic upheaval, like the proliferation of “netspeak” in the early 2000s, are not always as scary as they seem, the linguist David Crystal [b. 1941; British writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster] argued in his 2001 book “Language and the Internet” [Cambridge University Press]. Rather, they can allow for bursts of creativity.

“The internet is Homo loquens at its best,” Professor Crystal told The New York Times in 2001. “It shows language expanding richly in all sorts of directions.”

[Homo loquens is Latin for “speaking man,” a term that highlights the uniqueness and significance of human speech and language abilities as a distinctive behavior of our species. Note, for comparison, the scientific name for our species is Homo sapiens, ‘knowing man,’ and a 1938 Dutch book by historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) is Homo ludens, ‘playing man,’ that examines the play element in culture and society.]

An Etymology Nerd Is Born

It is easy to imagine that Mr. Aleksic might be the son of linguistics professors, or perhaps a descendant of the creator of Scrabble. In reality, he is the child of two atmospheric research scientists at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. His mother works in air-pollution modeling, he said, and his father is “an expert in cloud physics, or something.”

Mr. Aleksic grew up in Albany, N.Y., and got interested in linguistics as a freshman in high school after reading “The Etymologicon” [Icon Books, 2011] by Mark Forsyth. He started his own blog about word origins — etymologynerd.com — which broke down one word a day, including, early on, sophomore (which shares Greek roots with “sophisticated” and “moron”).

In college, he helped found the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and majored in linguistics and government. During his final semester on campus, he began posting linguistics videos on TikTok at the suggestion of a friend. The strategy earned him millions of views as well as some critics, who gather in Reddit forums to pick apart his facts or his delivery. “I like fun facts about etymology,” one wrote. “I don’t like having them shouted at me.”

Mr. Aleksic doesn’t mind those complaints. He said he works hard to keep viewers’ attention, for example, jumping between camera angles roughly every eight seconds. He longed for a forum in which he could discuss his ideas at length, and last January, he began refining an idea for a book about algorithms and language.

That’s an ambitious goal for a recent college graduate without an advanced degree or decades of research experience, the kinds of qualifications that abound in the linguistics publishing crowd. But youth has its upsides when it comes to the world of internet slang, said Gretchen McCulloch, the author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language” [Riverhead Books, 2019].

“The tricky thing with internet linguistics is that the point at which you’re the most qualified to speak about it from personal experience is also the point at which you have the least, sort of, academic credibility,” Ms. McCulloch said in an interview.

She, too, is fascinated by how short-form video is affecting language, though she wonders which changes will be permanent and which will fade with time. Take the way that influencers often begin their videos with superlatives like “The most interesting thing about . . . [.]” Will those hyperbolic phrases bleed into other forms of communication, or will they lose their potency with overuse? There is a whole graveyard full of internet-speak — “on fleek” [‘perfectly done,’ ‘exactly right,’ ‘excellent’], you will be missed — that has fallen out of fashion.

While Mr. Aleksic wades through these big questions, he is also making time for really small ones. He is hoping to make a video about urinal conversations, which have been the subject of more academic papers than you might think. While we spoke, he pulled up his email inbox to scan through the questions that had come in from his followers. (He gets about 10 a day.)

“Somebody emailed me about the word ‘thank’ versus ‘thanks,’” he said, scrolling through a message. “You know, that’s kind of interesting.”

[Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for the Times.

[There are several of other posts on language and words on Rick On Theater.  Some that might amuse you are: “Franglais,” “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations,” “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer.]

Even The Best Minds Have Their Bad Days

 
“WHEN GENIUS BOMBS (1995)”
by Joel Achenbach

[This column by Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach was posted on “Achenblog,” the writer’s blog on the Post website, on 24 January 2013.  It’s an extension of a shorter version that ran in the print edition on 16 April 1995 in the “Sunday Arts” section.  Achenbach’s thesis is that “Geniuses mess up too.  This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.”  He provides examples of bad art by the world’s masters as evidence of this.]

(I posted about half of this piece some years ago on this blog, and will now paste in the whole thing. Titled “When Genius Bombs,” the story originally ran 4/16/1995 in the Sunday Arts section, which at that time was under the stewardship of [David James] Von Drehle [b. 1961; Washington Post arts editor, 1994-95]. Though the references to Bill Clinton [William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946); 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001] date the piece a little, and I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way today — it’s painfully glib, and where are the footnotes??? — I think in general it holds up well and has the redeeming quality of being essentially right about the nature of genius.)

Scene IV. Another part of the forest.

Enter DEMETRIUS and CHIRON, with LAVINIA, ravished; her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out.

Dem. So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and revish’d thee.

Chi. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

Dem. See, how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.

Chi. Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.

Dem. She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks . . .

That’s “Titus Andronicus” [Act 2, Scene 4; written between 1588 and 1593]. It’s by [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], early in his career, in his “Pulp Fiction” [1994 crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963)] phase.

The basic plot is, everyone stabs and rapes and mutilates everyone else while speaking in verse, and then they all die. Lavinia’s may be the worst speaking role in the history of the stage. Character development is not the play’s strength. At the beginning of the play Titus Andronicus is a cruel warmonger; by the end, he’s exactly the same, a cruel warmonger.

Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee;

[Kills Lavinia].

And, with thy shame, thy father’s sorrow die!

For centuries, Shakespearean scholars have been stumped by the play. It’s so . . . awful. Mention “Titus Andronicus” to Harold Bloom, English professor at Yale and policeman of the Western canon, and he immediately says, “Boy, is that bad. It’s just a bloodbath. There’s not a memorable line in it.”

The Bard, bad? How’s that possible? Isn’t Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of the English language, pulling away from the pack like Secretariat at the Belmont? How could the same guy write “King Lear” [thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606] and this crappy thing?

[Secretariat (1970-89) was a champion thoroughbred racehorse who was the ninth winner of the American Triple Crown (1973), setting and still holding the fastest time record in all three of its constituent races (Kentucky Derby in May, Preakness Stakes in May, Belmont Stakes in June). The first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, his record-breaking, 31-length victory at Belmont is often considered the greatest event in horse racing history. The horse’s margin of victory and winning time (2′24″) are records that still stand.]

Here’s the best explanation: Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad [Ludwig van] Beethoven [1770-1827; German composer and pianist]. There are failed [Pablo] Picassos [1881-1973; Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer]. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein [1879-1955; German-born theoretical physicist; best known for developing the theory of relativity]. Duke Ellington [1899-1974; jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra] would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles [1915-85; director, actor, writer, producer, and magician; known for his innovative work in film, radio, and theater] made both the instant classic “Citizen Kane” [1941; RKO Radio Pictures; often called the greatest film ever made] and the instant trivia answer “The Lady From Shanghai” [1947 film noir; Columbia Pictures; considered a disaster in America when released but now regarded as a classic of film noir].

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner [1813-83; German composer, theater director, essayist, and conductor] doesn’t mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian. Leon Botstein [b. 1946; Swiss-born American conductor, educator, historical musicologist, and scholar], a composer and president of Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], says of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial March” [1876], “It’s a dog. He did it for the money.”

[Wagner’s Centennia March (sometimes American Centennial March) was commissioned by the city of Philadelphia, site of the Centennial Exhibition (10 May-10 November 1876), the first world’s fair to be held in the United States, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The commission, for which Wagner was paid $5,000—a huge sum at the time, worth $150,000 in 2025—was recommended by Theodore Thomas (1835-1905; German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator; founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), a great Wagnerian advocate who was very disappointed with the work when it arrived. According to some sources, the composer quipped to friends that the best thing about the march was the fee he received for writing it.]

The Beatles [English rock band formed in Liverpool; 1960-70; widely regarded as the most influential band in Western popular music]: geniuses, right? Explain, then, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” [1968]. Explain “Run for Your Life” [1965].

You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl.
Hide your head in the sand, little girl.
If I catch you with another man, that’s the end-ah, little girl.

“Even outstanding people have phenomenal failures. That’s why so many people don’t achieve success, because the first time they fail they think they can’t be successful,” says Dean Keith Simonton [b. 1948; Distinguished Professor Emeritus; known for research in the fields of genius, creativity, leadership, and aesthetics], a psychologist at the University of California at Davis and author of “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why” [Guilford Press, 1994]. In his book he writes, “Creative geniuses stumble; they trip; they make horrible mistakes. Their highest and most acclaimed successes are constructed on the low rubble of humiliating failures.”

Genius is a romanticized form of intelligence and talent. We like to imagine that genius emerges from the artist like perspiration, dripping all over the place. When the reputation of a creative genius reaches a certain point — the super-genius status of a Leonardo [da Vinci (1452-1519); Italian polymath of the Renaissance; painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect] or a Shakespeare or a Beethoven — there is a natural tendency among scholars to save every sketch, note, letter, scribble, coffee stain and discarded hankie from the hand of the Great One. John Lennon [1940-80; English singer-songwriter, musician, and activist; founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles; songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney (b. 1942; English singer, songwriter, and musician; played bass guitar and piano, and sang lead vocals with the Beatles; one of the most successful composers and performers ever) is the most successful in history] wrote some short stories; they were promptly labeled “Joycean” [characteristic of the writing of James Joyce (1882-1941; Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic); in a style employing innovative verbal style, often involving stream-of-consciousness, complex language, and experimental techniques] by admiring critics.

Over time the master artist takes on the character of a superbeing, a cartoon genius. A piano is to [Franz] Liszt [1811-86; Romantic-period Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher] as a hammer is to Thor, God of Thunder. We can imagine Beethoven composing by day and solving baffling murders by night.

The problem here is not that geniuses are overrated. If anything, the intellectual fashion is anti-genius, anti-masterpiece. There are academic circles in which it is considered daft to believe that some individuals are smarter and better and more talented than others. Suggest such a thing and people will look at you like you’re an imbecile.

The problem with “genius” is that it doesn’t give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time. [Unless, of course, they’re Jackson Pollock (1912-56; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing household paint onto a horizontal surface; see "Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” [4 March 2016]) or Morris Louis (1912-62; one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting; his signature method was pouring diluted acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas; see “Morris Louis” [15 February 2010]). ~Rick]

Picasso would paint something, look at it — at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso — and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn’t good enough.

W. H. Auden [1907-73; British-American poet] once said, “The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.”

Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.

Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they’re without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.

But if geniuses can fail, then perhaps there is hope that the converse is true: That the mediocre minds of the world, due to luck, courage, or the random distribution of quality, are not immune to spasms of greatness.

Picasso’s Fakes

There’s an anecdote about Picasso, possibly apocryphal, that illustrates the phenomenon. An art dealer was trying to sell a painting by Picasso to a potential buyer. The buyer said he wasn’t sure of its authenticity, and wanted the artist himself to vouch for it. Picasso was summoned. He looked at the painting and said it was a fake. The buyer left. The dealer was perplexed. He turned to Picasso and said, “Didn’t you tell me yourself that you painted it?” “I did,” said Picasso. “I often paint fakes.”

That’s the standard response of many scholars when faced with something lousy by a great master. Can’t be real, they say. Gotta be by someone else. Often the only reason to doubt the authenticity of the work is simply that it’s not so hot. It’s just unacceptably mediocre.

For example, desperate scholars have occasionally argued that Shakespeare didn’t write “Titus Andronicus,” or that he had a collaborator. Shakespeare himself never put his name on any published version — he surely knew it was dreck [Yiddish for ‘crap,’ ‘junk,’ ‘trash,’ from Dreck, German for ‘dirt’]. His contemporaries gave him authorial credit, but that did not squelch the theory that it was, at the very least, a collaboration, and the “bad parts” have been blamed on some knucklehead named George Peele [1556-96; English translator, poet, and dramatist]. But in 1943 the scholar Hereward T. Price [1880-1964; born in Madagascar; English author and professor of English at the University of Michigan], after poring over all the evidence and theories, wrote [in “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus,” published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (42.1)], “We must conclude, however regretfully, that Shakespeare was the author of ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

Mistakes and errors are integral to the process of creation. As the poet James Fenton [b. 1949; English poet, journalist, and literary critic] said in a recent lecture at Oxford, the text of which was reprinted in the New York Review of Books [42.5 (23 March 1995)], “For a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity.”

George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950; Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist] talked about the “field theory” of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

[The novels: Immaturity (1879), a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England; The Irrational Knot (1880), a critique of conventional marriage; Love Among the Artists (1881), an exploration of themes of romance, artistic integrity, and socio-political commentary; Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), an indictment of society; An Unsocial Socialist (1883), the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism.]

Shaw believed in productivity — just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes [1943-2022], a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw’s attitude was that “you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece.”

Geniuses work hard. They’re prodigious. They can’t stop themselves from churning out work. Thomas Edison [1847-1931] couldn’t stop inventing. Joyce Carol Oates [b. 1938] can’t stop writing. Shaw published 55 plays. Milton Avery [1885-1965] spewed paintings by the museum-load; when asked how he got inspiration, he said by going to the studio every day.

The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. “Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain,” says Howard Gardner [b. 1943; developmental psychologist], a professor of education at Harvard. “People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it’s not the case that every idea is a good idea.”

Here’s a bad idea: “Wellington’s Victory.”

Beethoven composed it [in 1813] to celebrate a British victory over an army commanded by Joseph Bonaparte [1768-1844; French statesman, lawyer, and diplomat], Napoleon’s [1769-1821] brother. It is often compared unfavorably to another piece of bombast, the “1812 Overture” [1880] by [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky [1840-93; Russian composer]. Jim Svejda [b. 1947; music commentator and critic], in “The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire” [Prima Publishing, 1988], says, “As if it weren’t bad enough losing most of his army to the Russian winter and then getting mauled at Waterloo, poor Napoleon . . . also had to have his nose rubbed in it by two of history’s supreme masterpieces of musical schlock [Yiddish: something of cheap or inferior quality; junk]: Tchaikovsky’s refined and tasteful 1812 Overture and this embarrassing garbage by Beethoven.”

One need not buy it to listen to it. You can go to the Library of Congress, to the Music Division.

”‘Wellington’s Victory’ doesn’t quite work at the gut level,” concedes Sam Brylawski, a recorded-sound specialist, as he fills out the request slip. “But it’s not like listening to someone in the basement on an out-of-tune guitar.”

The request slip goes to a person at a desk. Somewhere, unseen, a record album is pulled and dusted. After about 10 minutes the album jacket, minus the album, appears, enclosed in plastic, on a dumbwaiter. The person at the desk says into a telephone, “The listener is ready.” From the other end of the line, someone decrees that you go into listening booth No. 9.

In the booth you punch a button labeled “Talk.” A voice says hello. You say you’re ready to listen. A moment later, “Wellington’s Victory” has begun.

You hear drums in the distance, faint.

They get louder. Faster. Then they get much louder and much faster. The army is approaching.

Trumpets! Or maybe bugles. They are bugling with great fanfare.

Then: Flutes, gentle, chirpy, happy, a Yankee Doodle sort of thing, like what you’d imagine a fife-and-drum outfit playing, and then some loud strings, and then an army approaches from another direction, with more drums and trumpets and a little fussy-personage music with a triangle tinkling in the background, and finally the battle royal explodes, with cannon noises and gunshots, the drums pounding, trumpets blaring, the room almost shaking with banging and whanging and thudding and thumping. If they could play it in Sensurround, you’d get injured.

Someone had the temerity to write a bad review of the piece as soon as it came out. Beethoven was incensed. He wrote a note in the margin of the review:

“You wretched scoundrel! What I excrete is better than anything you could ever think up!”

(Of course he didn’t really write “excrete.” He wrote in German. And he used a word that made the point much more graphically.)

[The offending review of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory was by Gottfried Weber (1779-1839; German music theorist, musician, and composer), and appeared in the German music magazine Cäcilia (which Weber founded) in 1825.

[Beethoven’s marginal reply in German was, according to my search: Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist besser, als was du je gedacht. That translates, more literally than Achenbach’s rendering, as ‘Oh you pathetic wretch, what I shit is better than what you ever thought of.’ (Scheissen is the German verb ‘to shit.’ Now you know.)]

Crossing Genres

Leonardo da Vinci notwithstanding, genius usually doesn’t carry over from one genre to another. Harold Bloom [1930-2019; literary critic] says, “[Miguel de] Cervantes [1547?-1616; Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists] was a disaster on the stage. He wrote very bad stage plays, like the ‘Siege of Numancia’ [sic: ‘Numantia’; ca, 1582]. It’s his most famous play. It failed. Badly.”

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare [sic: Poincaré; 1854-1912; French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science] could not add. He wrote, “I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake.”

Even within a masterpiece there can be a flub — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” [1884 in Britain; 1885 in the U.S.] may be the greatest American novel ever written, but in the final few chapters Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears, and there’s a tortured sequence where Tom tries to engineer the liberation of the slave Jim even though Jim isn’t locked up and they could all just walk away. Tom thinks it must be a dramatic liberation. Huck sort of tags along. Unfortunately it’s too late to edit that part out.

Brilliant minds screw up for all sorts of extra-artistic reasons. Maybe they are doing something just for the money. Maybe they’re sick. Maybe they’re no longer sick — some scholars think Edvard Munch [1863-1944; Norwegian painter] (“The Scream” [1893]) lost his edge after he had psychiatric treatment, says J. Carter Brown [1934-2002], former director of the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.].

Another problem is overreaching. That’s what happened to Einstein. He was a very smart man. Indeed he may have been the smartest human being on the planet in his day. But he could also be, relatively speaking, a moron.

In the first two decades of the century Einstein was on a roll like the scientific world hadn’t seen since Isaac Newton [1643-1727; English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author]. Einstein discerned, through thought experiments, that the universe obeyed fantastic principles of relativity, and that Newtonian physics, while valid, was still only an approximation of reality. He enveloped Newtonian physics in his new theory of relativity, which we would explain here if we knew anything about it other than clocks move slowly in really fast spaceships.

He followed the special theory of relativity with something even more intellectually astonishing: The general theory. Special, then general.

Then he tried to do something bigger. He wanted a unified field theory. This would be a theory that somehow linked gravitation with electromagnetism. That was the bridge too far. Eight decades later it still hasn’t been done. In his mad quest Einstein refused to accept many of the new orthodoxies of quantum mechanics. He thought the universe was fundamentally deterministic — that one thing followed another in a predictable fashion. His colleagues said nuh-uh. The universe is probabilistic, they said. Can’t be sure of anything.

“He was very uncomfortable with the Uncertainty Principle,” says Frank Wilczek [b. 1951; theoretical physicist, mathematician, and Nobel laureate (Physics, 2004)], a professor of natural science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Einstein worked for several decades. Wilczek has frequent reason to think of Einstein — he lives in Einstein’s house on Mercer Street. “It is a pity that he might have made further great discoveries if he had taken quantum mechanics to heart. As great as he was, he certainly could have done better in those last 35 years.”

[The Uncertainty Principle, first introduced in 1927 by German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), is a core concept in quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. In simple terms, it states that you cannot know both the exact position and momentum (speed and direction) of a particle at the same time. The more accurately you know one, the less accurately you can know the other. This isn’t due to limitations of our measuring equipment, but rather a fundamental property of nature at the quantum level, according to the theory.]

One can understand Einstein’s instinct, though. He believed in himself. He did the special, he did the general, why not the unified? He knew there was something more out there, a mystery at the fundament of creation, and it would have been unnaural not to seek to solve it.

You start reconfiguring the universe, it’s hard to stop.

One Chair

Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: “The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They’re always trying to make a masterpiece, they’re always trying to do something wonderful.”

Rosenthal sits surrounded by Rothkos [Mark Rothko (1903-70); Russian-born American abstract painter]. They are big, bold canvases, abstract, a visual language not everyone can understand, but which Rosenthal finds profoundly moving, like listening to magnificent music.

He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist’s studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. “There’s only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I’m sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt’s time, it’d be the same thing. There’d be one chair.”

Robert Sternberg [b. 1949; psychologist and psychometrician (scientist who studies the measurement of people’s knowledge, intelligence, skills, and abilities)], a Yale psychologist and co-author of “Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity” [Free Press, 1995] says creativity has three aspects:

1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. “In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They’re large-volume producers. But you don’t even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don’t hear about the junk,” says Sternberg.

Creative ideas can be applied in unlikely places. Sternberg cites the example of a 3M [formerly the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company] engineer who was trying to make a strong adhesive. He screwed up and made a weak adhesive. So then he asked himself: Of what use might a weak adhesive be? This led him to invent Post-It notes.

2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson [1865-1959; art historian specializing in the Renaissance] used to say: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday.”

3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it. This is the part of creative genius where someone like Madonna [b. 1958; pop singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress] excels.

Sternberg mentions Bill Clinton as a political genius who hasn’t mastered all three of these steps. Clinton is most adept at steps 1 and 3. He synthesizes boatloads of ideas, and in the right forum he’s a smooth salesman, bordering on slick. But he doesn’t self-select very well. “His good ideas get lost in the klunkers,” says Sternberg.

They Can’t Help It

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can’t plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

“Breakthrough is not when you want it, it’s not when you expect it. It’s a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough.”

And what causes the constant activity? It’s not money. It’s not glory. It’s an “inner necessity,” he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you’ll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

“Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you’ll never make the breakthrough,” he says. “The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It’s the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It’s a form of madness.”

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can’t stand to be anything else.

Shakespeare wrote 24 masterpieces, by Harold Bloom’s count. Almost his entire output appeared in a 20-year period. At his peak he managed 13 plays in seven years. They weren’t too shabby: “Much Ado About Nothing” [1598-99], “Henry V” [1598-99], “Julius Caesar” [1599-1600], “As You Like It” [1599-1600], “Twelfth Night” [1599-1600], “Hamlet” [1600-01], “Merry Wives of Windsor” [1600-01], “Troilus and Cressida” [1601-02], “All’s Well That Ends Well” [1602-03], “Measure for Measure” [1604-05], “Othello” [1604-05], “King Lear” [1605-06], and “Macbeth” [1605-06]. As a general rule, when a creator creates most, the creator creates best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940; novelist, essayist, and short story writer] experienced the flip side of that rule. His first novel, “This Side of Paradise” [1920], established him as a popular, promising novelist. He soon wrote another novel [The Beautiful and Damned (1922)] and then a couple of years later came his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” [1925]. Then he began to struggle. “Gatsby” was hard to follow. He began a book called “Tender Is the Night” but couldn’t finish it. Years passed. He drank a lot. He dithered. He partied with his expatriate friends in France. Still he didn’t finish the book. His wife had a nervous breakdown. Finally after eight years of labor he completed it [1934]. The novel has some terrific parts. It also has some parts that are cringe-inducing.

Linda Patterson Miller, a professor of English at Penn State, says, “I keep going back to that book, ‘Tender Is the Night,’ thinking it’s got to be better than it is.”

She cites one passage as particularly horrible. It’s when Dick Diver returns to his hotel with the young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. Diver is married. His wife, Nicole, is sleeping nearby. But he and Hoyt are infatuated with each other. They go into Hoyt’s room.

“When you smile — ” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late — she came up close against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it — I never expected to — I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

Prof. Miller says, “It’s absolutely childish and embarrassing to read.”

Fitzgerald wound up going to Hollywood to write screenplays — artistic death. Meanwhile he cranked out short stories for magazines. Did it for the money. Drank. Drank some more. Died young [44].

It’s a sad story. But the most creative minds know better than anyone else the difference between a “Gatsby” and a “Tender Is the Night,” between a “Titus Andronicus” and an “Othello.” Genius recognizes itself, and its counterfeit.

In his notebook, Fitzgerald jotted down his thoughts on seeing his brilliance dissolve into mediocrity:

I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high . . . because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in . . .

April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paintbox.

[Joel Achenbach reports on science and health.  He joined the Washington Post in 1990 as a feature writer in the Style section.  In 2005, he joined the Sunday magazine, writing features and a weekly humor column, and started the newsroom’s first blog, “Achenblog.”  He was part of the team that produced a series of stories about the opioid epidemic that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 2020.

[In 1999, Simon & Schuster published his examination of the scientific and cultural fascination with extraterrestrial life, Captured by Aliens.  His 2004 book, The Grand Idea (Simon & Schuster), described George Washington’s plans to bind the young nation together through commerce along the Potomac River.  His 2011 book A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea (Simon & Schuster) told the story of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill off of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and how the blown-out well was finally plugged.]

New York City: Unbearable Yet Irresistible

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”

[Many people, New Yorkers or not, remember the iconic Daily News front-page, banner headline on 30 October 1975: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”  (Frank Van Riper’s article about President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail the city out of its financial crisis started on page 3, but the head, accompanying a photo of our only unelected president, screamed out alone on page 1.)

[Well, these days, there’s some of that feeling making the rounds in the Big Apple again.  So, about a month ago, the New York Times ran a piece on the mixed feelings about the nation’s largest city held by many of its own residents.  It seemed like an interesting addition to my sometime series, “A Helluva Town,” so I’m posting it for you ROTters who wonder how we denizens of that city on the right coast that pretty much floats in the Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey are coping.]

”LIFE IN A CONFOUNDING METROPOLIS”
by John Leland and Dodai Stewart 

[Leland and Stewart’s wide-ranging article ran in the New York Times of 22 June 2025 in the “Metropolitan” Section.]

Heading into the June 24 primary for mayor, New Yorkers say their city is in trouble. In four recent surveys, majorities said that the quality of life was fair or poor, that they were afraid to ride the subway at night, that housing and child care were unaffordable, and that city government and the public schools were dysfunctional.

[New York City’s 2025 mayoral primary election was a solely Democratic affair. Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa (b. 1954; radio talk show host and founder and chief executive officer of the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit crime prevention organization) ran unopposed and automatically secured the Republican nomination. He was the Republican nominee for the 2021 election, losing to Democratic nominee Eric Adams (b. 1960; former police officer, Borough President of Brooklyn [2014-21], and New York State Senator [2007-13]).

[Adams, the incumbent mayor and former Democrat, didn’t run in the primary, choosing instead to run for re-election as an independent in the general election. In a major upset, Zohran Mamdani (b. 1991), a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary, defeating former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo (b. 1957; lawyer and politician; son of former governor Mario Cuomo [1932-2015; in office from 1975 to 1978]) by 12 percentage points. Cuomo served as Governor of New York from 2011 until his resignation in 2021.

[Also in the race were Brad Lander (b. 1969), New York City Comptroller; Adrienne Adams (b. 1960), Speaker of the New York City Council; Scott Stringer (b. 1960), former New York City Comptroller; Michael Blake (b. 1982), former New York Assemblyman; Selma Bartholomew (birthdate unknown), educator, and Paperboy Prince (b. 1993), artist and perennial candidate.

[Those who will be on the ballot this fall are:

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee
Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor, running as an independent
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, running as an independent
Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor, also running as an independent

 [Election Day is scheduled for 4 November 2025.]

Yet on a muggy evening in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, that pessimism was nowhere to be found. A skateboard ramp the size of a dollar van had been erected on the cobblestone street outside an art gallery, and skateboarders showed off tricks as onlookers with tattoos, baggy pants and stylish scarves shouted encouragement.

[The venue was Gallery 23 on Little West 12th Street; the exhibit was Harold Hunter ’97, 5-9 June 2025. Hunter (1974-2006) was, as Leland and Stewart note below, a professional skateboarder and actor who had appeared in Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids. The photos were by Jonathan Mannion (b. 1970).]

Inside the exhibition space, a very “if you know, you know” collection of New Yorkers — graffiti artists, skaters, photographers, musicians — mingled, hugged and laughed in front of huge photographs of a deceased actor slash skateboard legend who was being honored. As the D.J. played a mix of old-school hip-hop and Brazilian lounge music, two bartenders mixed bespoke cocktails made from a small batch spirit splashed with a lime-and-yuzu soda. It certainly didn’t feel like a scene from a city in crisis.

[Yuzu soda is a carbonated beverage featuring yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that has a unique flavor profile often described as a blend of grapefruit, lemon, and tangerine.]

New York, which was hit hard as the country’s epicenter of the Covid pandemic, remains a beacon for people across the country and the world, a destination for immigrants, artists, entrepreneurs and business scions. Watchful outsiders and New Yorkers themselves anxiously question whether the city is “back” from the troubles of recent years. And every New Yorker could have a different answer about what a comeback looks like — what the city should be, and what it is right now.

“From where I’m sitting, it looks pretty good,” said Lloyd Blankfein [b. 1954], who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and went on to run Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 2018. He compared the city today with the one of the late 1970s, when the Son of Sam serial killer terrorized locals [1975-77] and the city was on the verge of default [1975-85].

“If you had no perspective for the long view, you’d think we were in the depths of crisis,” Mr. Blankfein said. “If you take the long view of New York, it’s a straight line going up.”

The data paint a mixed picture. Subway crime is down, but the number of people in homeless shelters remains way above what it was just a few years ago. Broadway revenues smashed records this season, but one in four New Yorkers lived in poverty as of 2023, nearly double the national average.

[The 2024-25 Broadway season was a record-breaking year for revenue, reaching $1.89 billion in grosses. This surpasses the previous record of 2018-2019 season, which brought in $1.83 billion.]

In one survey, by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, 80 percent said the city was heading in the wrong direction, and 58 percent said they seriously considered moving out.

Unemployment is down from its pandemic peak, but only one in three workers in New York has a “good job” — one offering a living wage, health insurance and safe working conditions. Housing costs are astronomical — but for some people, no problem.

“People are buying,” said Penny Toepfer, a broker with more than 25 years of experience in luxury real estate. She pointed to the new Armani Residences building that opened on Madison Avenue in the fall of 2024, where apartments range from $8 million to $32 million. “It sold out,” she said.

It’s a very good time to be a broker, she said. “We’re making money. We are making money! I’m talking about big, big money.”

How the city looks, and what you want from the next mayor, depend in part on your place in the food chain, said John Mollenkopf [b. 1946; political scientist and sociologist], director of the Center for Urban Research. Though many parts of the city look fully recovered from the pandemic, the rebound has been uneven.

“One reason it is hard for those of us in upper-middle-class occupations and neighborhoods to understand this is that conditions are objectively much better in our places but that working class and poor neighborhoods are still feeling quite a bit of stress,” Mr. Mollenkopf said.

When New Yorkers emerged from their homes after the worst of Covid, Mr. Mollenkopf said, they saw a city that seemed to have slipped its reins: bicyclists flouting all traffic laws, commuters jumping turnstiles, public drinking and pot smoking, emotionally disturbed people ranting at passers-by. “There was this feeling that the city was out of control,” he said.

Valerie Iovino runs the Facebook group Moms of the Upper East Side, where 35,000 members discuss all aspects of raising children in New York. She grew up in the neighborhood and is now raising her 10-year-old daughter there.

She said she doesn’t consider the city to be in crisis currently. But if you’d asked her a year or two ago, she might have said it was. Restaurants were closing early, everyone was stressed, there were constant protests and, she said, “a very bad rat problem.”

But lately, she has felt a shift, with new businesses opening, a reduction in rats, and restaurant trash in bins, instead of on the street. She was out at 10 p.m. one night and restaurants were packed. “The city, it’s starting to be fun again,” she said. “I mean, it’s not fun like it was in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. But it’s fun.”

Still, affordability, especially where families are concerned, is often top of mind for her and her fellow mothers.

“Child care is prohibitively expensive for a lot of families,” Ms. Iovino said. “And that’s why a lot of people move out of the city.”

She also pointed to some basic quality-of-life issues that she described as “lingering”: “The mental health crisis on the street, with the unhoused,” she said. “There have to be services for people who need them.” Meanwhile, her daughter’s chief complaint is “the obstacle course of dog poop.”

A few miles north of Ms. Iovino, in the South Bronx neighborhood where Pablo Muriel works as a high school dean, there are also signs of fresh development, including new high-rises. But they only add to his students’ and their parents’ feeling that they’ve been cheated. “They were promised law and order,” Mr. Muriel said. What they got was families having to double up in public housing, working two or three jobs, and a view of new buildings that are near them but not for them.

“They don’t feel that they count,” Mr. Muriel said. “A lot of them feel that society has given up on them.”

Many students have not caught up developmentally from the Covid lockdown, when schools were closed fully or partially for 18 months, Mr. Muriel said. “I have 14-year-old kids that catch tantrums as an 8-year-old, something that I never experienced before,” he said.

The city’s stresses — economic, emotional, political — come together in the subway, where a fraying infrastructure meets a surging mental health crisis. “You can’t ride the subway without at least one homeless person in your car, acting disturbing,” said Stan Lawson, a train operator for 11 years. In a survey by the Citizens Budget Commission, only 22 percent of New Yorkers said they felt safe on the subway at night.

Lately, Mr. Lawson’s work has been made even more stressful by young people surfing the trains or pulling the emergency brake. “When a conductor goes to investigate, they’ll break into the conductor’s cab and steal the bag, take the keys,” he said.

He is now contemplating the previously unthinkable: moving out of New York. “It feels like staying here is not going to be something I want to do later on,” he said.

Ting Ting, 30, a content creator and native New Yorker who lives in Flushing, Queens, also has a problem with the subway: The 7 train always seems to be under construction, and it’s way too hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn. “It’s like that empty chunk on the subway map that no one cares about,” she said.

But she said that cellphone videos of negative incidents on streets and subway create an exaggerated feeling of chaos, whereas positive aspects of living in the city don’t blow up on social media. “There are more good things in New York than bad things,” she said. And even if the subway doesn’t improve, she’s not leaving. “I have traveled to other places,” she said. “I just don’t think I can live anywhere but New York.”

Gregory Purnell, who cuts hair at the confluence of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, in Brooklyn, knows where to take the city’s pulse. “Black barber shops are the internet of the ’hood,” he said, shaving a palm leaf into the back of a client’s head. “You go there and find out what’s going on, who’s who, this and that.”

At his shop, an unmarked door beneath two clattering elevated train lines, customers pay what they can — sometimes nothing. Mr. Purnell, 50, gives free haircuts at homeless shelters and said he sees people’s struggles but also a recent movement to create small-scale, affordable outlets — basement house parties, sober bars, vegan kitchens.

“So, little things are popping up around the city where it feels a little more underground or not as promoted,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more D.I.Y.”

Often the city’s vibrancy and its struggles live on the same blocks. Think the downtown arts boom of the ’70s, when artists and galleries reclaimed abandoned buildings of SoHo [Lower Manhattan], or hip-hop, which bloomed in a devastated South Bronx. Fast-forward to South Richmond Hill, Queens, near Kennedy Airport, where Sikh men in colorful turbans stroll through Little Guyana and new arrivals from Trinidad add a calypso beat to Little Punjab.

This churn of immigration and diversity has long been New York’s secret sauce, said Ric Burns [b. 1955; collaborated with brother Ken Burns (b. 1953) on The Civil War (1990); New York: A Documentary Film (1999-2003)], now filming a follow-up to his documentary series “New York.” As these values have come under fire in Washington, Mr. Burns said he sees New Yorkers defending them more ardently, in the same way that many embraced the city during the economic collapse of the ’70s.

[New York is a series of eight two-hour episodes. The project in progress may be episodes 9 and 10, “The Future of Cities (2000-2025),” which, according to Wikipedia, will be “A dramatic and compelling consideration of the forces that have transformed New York at the start of the 21st century: the most stunning era of growth and change, challenge and opportunity since the events of September 11th, and since the New York series’ last look at the city as a whole. The release date(s) is/are yet to be determined.]

“The forces of history are on the side of urban places,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be incredible conflict, and that’s deeply upsetting to consider, and we’re right in the middle of that. But I don’t know historians who see a bleak future for New York, even in the middle of the crises that have been going on.”

Today, entrepreneurs like Alex Kwan and Mahmoud Aldeen embody this overlay of hustle and anxiety. Both 37 and friends from Pennsylvania, they run a pair of halal Asian food trucks in Queens and Manhattan called Terry and Yaki.

“The mood I see is hesitant, shaky,” Mr. Kwan said. Their employees are worried about their immigration status, and customers are sometimes sharing a $12 plate of food. “If I had a family, I would move out,” he said. “But for business, there’s no better place than New York City.”

Yet he lamented a change in the city’s mood, from the community spirit and mutual aid that arose out of Covid to a harder edge today. “It’s a little less caring about your neighbor and a little bit more caring about myself,” he said.

For all the hand-wringing about artists being priced out of New York, applications for the fine arts program at Pratt Institute [Brooklyn] are up, said Jane South [British-American; b. 1965, Manchester, England; known for large-scale installations, mixed media constructions, and fabric wall pieces], chairwoman of the department [appointed Chair of Fine Arts in 2017].

She has noticed pop-up art shows in apartments, or students forming collectives after graduation. “They generate opportunities for themselves, for others,” Ms. South said. “There’s a tremendous amount of that going on.”

Which is not to say everything is perfect. There’s the lack of affordable housing and affordable art studio space. “But in times of crisis,” Ms. South said, “art helps us make meaning when meaning feels unstable. We bear witness, we record the moment.”

And, of course, Ms. South has heard “New York is dead” before. “When I came here in 1989, that’s what people were saying: ‘Oh, you should have been here in the ’70s.’”

Ada Calhoun [b. 1976], author of the book “St. Marks Is Dead” [W. W. Norton & Company, 2015], about the often declared demise of her East Village neighborhood, has spent much of her life debunking such reports. St. Marks Place, like the rest of the city, isn’t what it once was, but it never is.

[St. Mark’s Place is a three-block stretch of East 8th Street from 3rd Avenue east to Avenue A, named for the nearby St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery on 10th Street at Second Avenue. West of 3rd Avenue and east of Avenue B (the street is interrupted between Avenues A and B by Tompkins Square Park) the street reverts to the designation East 8th Street. 

[The Episcopal St. Mark's Church sits on the site of a family chapel built in 1660 by Peter (Petrus) Stuyvesant (c. 1610-72), governor of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664. Stuyvesant is buried beneath the chapel.]

“People in 1811 said the grid ruined the city, and it’s never going to be good again,” she said. “And they’ve always been wrong.” [Manhattan’s rectangular grid street plan was conceived in 1811 and implemented over the succeeding 60 years.]

She’s glad that her son’s East Village is safer than the one she grew up in. The musicians and struggling artists may be gone, priced out to Bushwick [Brooklyn] or Ridgewood [Queens], but there’s a new very indie bookstore and gallery [Village Works] on St. Marks where people hang out until 1 a.m.

“When people are like, ‘New York’s not that good’ — compared to what?” she said. “Oh, other places can be more livable, if you really care about the school district, or you care about comfort. But nothing is the same as New York.”

Bianca Pallaro contributed reporting.

[John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for the New York Times.

[Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.

[Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York.  He’s been a photojournalist for more than 25 years.]